


Take Out the Trash Day

by dotfic



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-13
Updated: 2007-10-13
Packaged: 2017-10-29 16:24:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/321810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dotfic/pseuds/dotfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's Sam's turn to clean out the Impala, and every piece of debris is a reminder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Out the Trash Day

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: Written for the [Supernatural-West Wing Title Challenge](http://luzdeestrellas.livejournal.com/114077.html) run by [](http://luzdeestrellas.livejournal.com/profile)[**luzdeestrellas**](http://luzdeestrellas.livejournal.com/) and for the lovely and talented [](http://embroiderama.livejournal.com/profile)[**embroiderama**](http://embroiderama.livejournal.com/) 's birthday. Thank you so much to [](http://musesfool.livejournal.com/profile)[**musesfool**](http://musesfool.livejournal.com/) for the beta.

Sam wakes up with a sour taste in his mouth, sweat tangling his bangs. The windows of the room he's sharing with Dean are wide open, but there's no wind that morning. With the shades up, the sun smacks him in the face, making things even hotter.

Shoving back his hair, Sam kicks off the single sheet and gets up. In the other bed, Dean's sound asleep, lying on his stomach in his boxers, looking like even the apocalypse couldn't wake him. Sam's tempted to go to the kitchen, get an ice cube, and put it on the back of Dean's neck just to see what would happen. But he'd like to live to see fourteen, and there's work to do.

He puts on a fresh t-shirt and shorts -- well, relatively fresh; he picks the clothes from his duffel bag that are least stinky -- and shoves his sneakers onto his feet without bothering with socks. Dean still doesn't stir, not even when Sam trips over the boots lying in the middle of the pock-marked wooden floor. They're Dean's, but Sam could wear them comfortably, with just a little room in the toe.

Down the hall, Dad's door is open a crack and Sam listens outside, head down, but there's no sound from within. He can see Dad's dark hair on the pillow through the narrow opening, the slow rise and fall of his shoulders in sleep. It looks like Dad's room is even more of a mess than theirs, which is unusual. No way Dad could have kept things in order last night, though. They'd gotten in around one in the morning, all three of them so exhausted they were practically leaning on each other to get up the stairs to the apartment. Without Dean's hand on his back, pushing him, Sam probably would've curled up in the stairwell and gone to sleep.

The water from the kitchen spigot is cold and tastes only a little metallic. He splashes his face, grabs two pop-tarts without bothering to toast them first, finds a trash bag, and heads outside. It's his turn to clean out the car, once a week whenever they stop long enough to allow for it. As he walks across the lawn of the squat, brick apartment building, grass tickling his bare ankles, Sam wonders how long Dean and Dad will sleep in.

He kind of likes this quiet, and being alone like this is great since he knows Dean and Dad are just a flight of stairs away, safe in their beds.

It's not like on Wednesday. Sometimes being alone was the worst thing in the world, what Sam imagines hell might feel like.

But this morning, it feels good and he craves it after the crazy string of towns and monsters and endless driving, always driving, of the past seven days straight. He opens the Impala's front passenger door, the squeak of metal loud in the bright morning, and crawls onto the bench. The inside of the car is tolerably cool, since it's early in the day yet and the sun hasn't been beating down on it for hours.

In the foot-well he finds a crumpled soda can, a pair of socks with mud crusted on them, and a blood-stained towel.

***

 _Monday. Cody, Wyoming._ Burping contest. Dean downed his soda in about four gulps, crushed the can in his hand and tossed it on the floor, then let out a belch so loud Dad groaned in disgust, then banned burping contests for all eternity.

 _Tuesday. Casper._ A kappa. Sam watched, book in hand, ready to shout out the Latin on his cue while Dean and Dad fought with the thing in the muddy shallows of the lake.

The thing knocked Dean down, driving his face into the mud. Before Sam could call out a warning or move or do anything useful, Dad blasted the kappa with ironshot and yanked Dean, coughing and gasping, up out of the water onto his feet. They had to start the spirit trap all over again, Dean covered in wet mud the whole time.

 _Wednesday. Denver, Colorado._ Multiple hauntings in a half-burned out shell of what had once been a grand mansion. Dad ordered Sam to wait in the car; there had been four violent deaths on the property in the last two weeks. The ghosts were luring people with lights or cries for help, and then murdering them in horrific ways.

Dad and Dean's flashlights caught the yellow police tape strung across the front porch. Sam watched as they stepped over it, watched as they vanished inside, taking the light with them. Watched the front of that house, his window rolled down, straining to hear any sounds from inside, a shotgun blast maybe. _No matter what you hear_ , Dad said. _You stay put._ But Sam heard nothing, saw nothing.

Fifteen minutes stretched to twenty, to thirty. Sam held up his wrist and stared steadily at his watch, eyes flickering to the house, as thirty turned into forty-five minutes. The silence felt oily.

At forty-seven minutes, Sam opened the car door, scrambled out. He took one step before the front door slammed open and Dean and Dad appeared. Dad was walking funny, Dean holding his shoulder, helping him down the wide porch steps. When they got close, in the beam of Dean's flashlight Sam saw the blood staining Dad's side.

"I thought I told you to stay in the car," Dad snapped at him.

***

Sam flings the bloodied towel quickly into the trash bag. The crumpled can follows. The socks he can salvage, all they need is a turn in the washing machine. He folds them and puts them on the hood. If they were an ordinary family, he would still be doing this, only instead of bloodied towels, there'd be more fast-food wrappers.

 _Ordinary_ is a word that's started to lose meaning for him because he's thought about it too many times, looking too much at the letters until it became the weirdest word in the English language. _Family_ still rolls easy in his mind, easy to understand and solid.

There's still no sign of life from upstairs. Sam stares up at the empty front windows that face the street, expecting to see Dad appear, shouting down a reminder or instruction. Or Dean, saying something smart-ass. He frowns, pushing aside the worry that twinges through him, and turns back to the Impala.

He opens one of the rear doors and climbs into the back, rummaging around on the floor. There's a clear plastic baggie knotted closed and full of water (as if it should hold a goldfish, which it doesn't), a seashell, and a cassette tape with its ribbon sprawled indecently across the floor. Sam's fingers pause over the tape, fingers curling away reflexively, like it might burn him.

***

 _Thursday. Santa Fe, New Mexico._ Chupacabra. The beast charged and Dean slid his body sideways to avoid it, shotgun to shoulder. But a rusted, abandoned piece of farm equipment snagged his ankle, and Dean stumbled, slamming his elbow hard against the wall of the shack. Dean cursed; Dad fired. The beast yelped like a dog, took one or two staggered, loping steps towards Dad and Dean, then slumped to the ground.

Dean's elbow swelled up. He could move his arm, wincing as he did it, and insisted he didn't need an ER. They stopped at a gas station that had an ice machine and Dad filled up a plastic bag with ice, tied it shut, and handed it to Sam. Under Dean's protests that he could do it himself, Sam spent the next stretch of highway holding it against Dean's elbow until the ice melted.

In the desert heat, the Impala's air conditioning didn't do much good, and it was stuffy in the car. Dad told Dean to watch where he put his feet next time. Dean snapped at Sam every time he asked how his elbow was, and finally Sam stopped asking. He curled up in his corner in the back seat with a book, not paying much attention as Dean tried to talk Dad into taking them to Las Vegas.

 _Friday. Hobbs._ Food. They stopped near the New Mexico/Texas border to eat, the sky a bright, aching blue. Sam, poking the toe of his sneaker into the dusty ground of the rest stop, struck something. He leaned down from the picnic bench to pick it up. It was a shell, curved with ridges along the back, brown fading to white.

"Hey, what's that?" Dean stopped chewing, leaning across the table, freckles multiplying in the hot sun.

"It's a shell," Sam said, frowning.

"Huh," Dean said, blinking, then went back to eating his sandwich.

"Let me see it, son," Dad said, holding out a big, sun-browned hand. Sam gave it to him and Dad turned it over in his fingers like he would with a silver half-dollar.

Sam grabbed another handful of Fritos but kept his eyes on the shell that looked much smaller now that Dad was holding it. "How would a sea shell get in the desert?"

"Maybe someone who'd been to the ocean was traveling back home and dropped it." Dad handed it back to Sam.

"That's pretty cool," Dean said. "Finding a seashell in the desert."

Sam lowered his head, looking at his sandwich so Dean wouldn't see how he was fighting not to smile proudly at being dubbed cool by Dean.

He put the shell in the back pocket of his shorts, but it vanished a hundred miles after that. He'd thought he'd lost it.

 _Saturday. Lubbock, Texas._ Nest of carbuncles.

"Douchebag."

"Fathead."

"Nimrod."

"Punk-ass."

"Settle down," Dad said, biting the words out. His eyes flicked from the road to the rear-view mirror, fixing Sam with an iron glance for a moment. Sam saw Dad's shoulders tensing beneath his t-shirt.

It was still ninety degrees in the shade, and the car's air conditioning seemed to be blowing mostly hot air. Just like Dean, who reached back across the front seat to try and smack Sam upside the head, but Sam ducked, muttering, "Shithead."

A silence descended after that. Sam leaned his back against the door and sat with his knees bent, sneakers on the upholstery. It made Dad yell, but at the moment he seemed more concerned about the end of the Battle of the Insults.

The miles slid by outside, low one-story houses, strings of electric wires, flat stretches that reached towards a horizon burning fiery with sunset.

"Look," Dean said finally, his voice low, blending with the rumble of the engine, "I grabbed the first thing I got my hands on, is all. Book, machete -- both'll work on a carbuncle."

Sam folded his arms.

"Who told you to leave your book in a hunting bag in the first place, dumbass?"

When Sam turned and looked out the back windshield, still not saying a word, Dean grated out, "Fine. Next time, I'll just let the carbuncle bite you instead of smacking it with some stupid textbook."

More silence. Sam slouched with his side against the soft leather of the back seat bench, the vibration of the car as it hummed over the road calming. He'd been using the textbook to study over the summer, wanting to make sure he could keep up at whatever school he found himself in that fall.

He really hadn't meant to put the book in the wrong bag, although why Dean would grab a book instead of another weapon was beyond him. This wasn't his fault.

He stared at the back of Dean's head. His brother was facing squarely forward, body language mirroring Dad's, eyes on the front windshield. Sam could see his face faintly reflected, and by the jut of Dean's jaw, he could tell Dean was gritting his teeth.

Sam's eyes slid down to the floor, and guilt made the flare of anger go out like water poured over a campfire. Right before the insult swapping began, Sam had found the Metallica cassette wedged in the crack of the back seat. Dean had misplaced it on Monday and had been grumbling about it at intervals ever since.

If he'd been in any other mood, if Dean hadn't just left a sticky, dark, gross smear of carbuncle guts all over the cover and seeping into the pages of his textbook so it was no longer readable, Sam would've given Dean the cassette. Instead, holding the cassette low so Dean and Dad couldn't see what he was doing, Sam had unspooled it partway, and tossed it on the floor.

Now it reproached him.

Sam nudged it with his foot, pushing it out of sight under the front bench.

***

He tucks the shell into the pocket of his shorts, throws away the plastic bag, then picks up the cassette between two fingers, careful not to snag the unspooled tape on anything.

After finding a pen in the glove compartment, Sam sits down cross-legged on the apartment building lawn. His tongue touches his upper lip as he inserts the pen into one of the cassette's holes, catching the plastic teeth, and begins to wind the ribbon back into place. With the heat, it's probably warped anyway. But he's got to try at least.

A small wind kicks up, easing the heat for a moment and making the trash bag next to him rustle. He catches a glimpse of the blood-stained towel and he thinks, _I'm not going to do this forever._

He's not. He can't. Waiting in the car with his mouth going dry with panic and fear, mopping blood off the only two people he loves in the whole entire world. Days and days of bad, greasy food, gross rest-stop bathrooms, strangers who look at him and Dean funny, never being in a school long enough to make friends or get on top of his school work.

Sam knows he'll figure it out eventually, who he is beyond John Winchester's son, and Dean Winchester's job.

Sam finishes winding up the cassette and holds it in his palm.

"Sammy! You done lounging around? Get that lazy ass in gear," Dean's voice shouts down at him with a teasing note.

Without turning to look, Sam lifts his arm and flips up his middle finger.

"Ooooh. I'm tellin' Dad." Dean's laugh is warm and mocking, makes Sam think of burping contests and conversations at picnic tables in places where breathtaking scenery is taken for granted. Big Sky Country and hot chocolate made with real cocoa and safety.

"Hey, Dean." Sam does turn finally, craning his neck back to look at his brother, who's leaning out the window, palms resting on the sill. He holds up the cassette. "I found your tape."

The surprised, delighted half-smile on Dean's face makes his insides clench with guilt again. "Dude."

"Wait," he says quickly, as Dean ducks his head inside, and Dean pauses. "It might not play so well anymore. It was hot all week and I found it wedged into the back seat. The tape's probably warped."

"Hey, don't sweat it. I'll bet some of the tracks still play. Thanks, man." Dean withdraws inside.

Sam untangles his legs, puts the cassette in the pocket with the shell. He takes one more pass through the car, getting the gum and fast-fool foil wrappers, scooping up as much as he can of some spilled salt.

After a little while, he smells bacon frying. Dad'll be up any minute. Sam finds the trash bins at the curb, and throws away the remains of the last seven days.

~end  



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